Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Instagram is one of the many social platforms available for sharing photography with your friends and around the world. While some claim the sheer volume of Instagram-style filterised photography is debasing "real" photography, there exists a pool of extremely talented photographers who showcase their work to a world-wide audience via this simple app.

The claim that Instagram is somehow degrading photography is a nonsense. It's the same sort of technologically deterministic argument that has been running alongside photography since its inception: like when photo sensitive metal plates gave way to glass; glass to celluloid; view cameras to box brownies; large format to roll film; esoteric to mass market; professional to amateur; 120 to 35mm; expensive to cheap; black and white to colour; film to digital.

The problem Instagram faces is not the quality as such, but trying to find quality images amongst the everyday mass of selflies and bathed cats. This problem is not unique to Instagram, the same issue has plagued the granddaddy of photo sharing, Flickr, since day dot.

Thankfully, Flickr's API allows sites like ffffl*ckr to exist. This site assumes that the people who like the images you like probably like much the same thing as you and so it goes, producing a constant stream of usually pretty good images.

Unfortunately, Instagram as an app is difficult to navigate in the same way. It does, however, have a few handy ways of finding imagery you might like:

Followers of those you follow - this might seem obvious, but the people who follow the people you follow probably produce similar imagery. In this bot-driven world, this isn't always the case but it's a good place to start. Look at the followers of the people you follow and the people they follow and so on.

"Following" - yes there's a thing called "following" that isn't entirely about the people you follow. It's located in the heart/comment bubble section. Where "News" is usually selected and shows the number of likes on your images, press "Following" and it will show other images those you follow have liked.

Tags - those ubiquitous # that appear everywhere from Microsoft Windows 3.1 for Workgroups to today's trending conversational vernacular "hashtag LOL!". I'm up with the Web 2.1 (service pack 3). Again, this may seem obvious, but a well tagged image is easier to find. If you like images of WD-40, then search for #wd40.

And I'm so glad I did, otherwise I wouldn't have found this little number. How droll!

#summary

Whether one likes it or not, mobile photography is a thing. A real thing. In a decade's time, we will be wondering why the hell anyone bothered making the arbitrary and patronising distinction between "mobile" photography and "everything else" photography. So, Guardian culture writer, get on board or go back to your wet plate tin-type daguerrotype collodion Bitumen of Juedea-driven snoozefest of conceited elitism.

Monday, 3 March 2014

Immigration Minister (and good Christian) Scott Morrison's now discredited first press conference regarding the Manus Island riot and subsequent death in custody was telling in a number of ways.

Firstly, it answered that age-old question about how many spin doctors it takes to outright lie to the public and generate synonyms for "operational reasons" (66 apparently - and they're not doing a very good job).

Secondly and far more disturbingly, Morrison demonstrated how callously and calculatingly this government uses language to dehumanise and stigmatise those who come across the seas.

Here's a couple of terms used by the Minister you might be a little confused about:

It was well reported Morrison insisted the term "illegal arrivals" be used to refer to refugees when he became minister. Because you don't want a whimp.

It is an important reminder of the power of language (or what little of it politicians have left intact). Orwell's Politics and the English Language is one of the finest works on the subject, presciently observing that "political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible."

More recently, Don Watson has has keenly observed the known knowns and known unknowns of the decay of language in his books Death Sentence and Weasel Words.
But it is absolutely vital to place this dehumanisation of language in its real context. Throughout history, language has been used as a "defence of the indefensible"; to acquiesce in unspeakable horrors.

The Third Reich referred to the Jews (and the Russians and the Slavs and the Gypsies and the Africans etc) as untermenschen with the resulting state sanctioned mass murders and atrocities which the world is yet to truly deal with (how do you even visualise six million??)

Closer to home, Niall Ferguson tells of how General Sir Thomas Blamey informed his troops the Japanese were a cross between "the human being and the ape" that had to be "exterminated" for the good of civilisation. The language of dehumanisation transformed the enemy into an alien to be wiped off the face of the earth. Such language helped perpetuate atrocity after atrocity and "man's inhumanity to man" throughout the twentieth century.

We should be extraordinarily skeptical whenever politicians such as Scott Morrison speak, for when they do, they do with an acid tongue designed to dehumanise and stigmatise (and gain the ascendency in Western Sydney).

"Transferee" is designed to shroud the human face of those who suffer for years in atrocious conditions, forlorn. Unfortunately it is only in death that a name might be put to the number and the words "deep sympathies" emanate from the acid tongue of the aforementioned Immigration Minister.

At some point, our nation will be forced to apologise for its treatment of refugees who have sought our shores. Like the forced adoptions of Aboriginal children, or those of single mothers or of child migrants or state wards, the Prime Minister of the day will make a statement before Parliament admonishing the behaviour of the "leaders" of the past. The vast majority of Australian will applaud him or her; a dissenting minority will stay tough and intransigent, arguing that back in the day, they didn't know any better.

Well, we do know better. We are better than this. You don't have to be a bleeding heart, lefty pinko inner-city latté swilling Socialist Alternative hipster to know that.